Archive for January, 2010

Re-jected!

The U.S. Supreme Court today struck down federal prohibitions against corporate campaign contributions, as well as key provisions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold “campaign finance reform” act that prohibited certain kinds of ads in the weeks leading up to elections.

The 5-4 ruling broke down along the usual ideological lines, with Chief Justice John Roberts joined in the majority by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy. Justices Stephen Breyer, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

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Bob Franken

Apparently, after his Massachusetts humiliation, President Obama has seen the light and he’s heading back to the future…back to 1992 and that mantra “It’s the Economy Stupid”.

His peeps aren’t saying so, but it looks like they’re about to jettison health care and cave, after telling us that comprehensive reform was vital to the nation and engaging the opposition in a brutal political war.

Giving up on health care reform?

Now, however they want to couch it, it appears they’re preparing to beat a hasty retreat, looking for some face-saving way out while leaving the millions of uninsured to fend for themselves.

Sure they got their butts kicked Tuesday and they truly do need to be much, much less “stupid” about the economy. But should that mean they should abandon health care as a lost cause? Why not take one last, principled stand? Instead of looking for an easy way out of their war with the Republicans, why not take it to them?

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Dan Calabrese

November 2010 is a lifetime away. An entire human being could gestate between now and then. So, too, could a complete rebirth of Democrats’ political fortunes – if they were smart enough to do a few simple things.

I don’t think they are.

Heft?

Now that their Senate supermajority is gone, the conventional wisdom is that it’s no longer possible for them to ever pass anything. You’d think no piece of legislation had ever been passed in the history of the nation without one party holding 60 seats in the Senate – a situation that has actually occurred very rarely during the lifetime of the republic.

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David Karki

That sound you heard last night was Barack Obama’s presidency crashing to an end, in the process setting a record for the fastest reaching of lame duck-hood in history. The election of Republican Scott Brown to the ultimate liberal symbol, the U.S. Senate seat held for half a century by the late Ted Kennedy, has changed everything.

Collapse.

To repeat what every Democrat is ominously thinking today: If that seat isn’t safe, none of ours is.

Obamacare, as we know it, is on life support – all that’s left is to do with the bill is exactly what it would do to people if passed – immediately pull the plug and kill it on the grounds it costs (the Democrats) too much (politically) to keep it alive any longer. Ah, the irony…

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Bob Franken

As I get directions from my car’s GPS, I often wonder what the turn-by-turn instructions would be like if the woman inside the device had emotional issues like:

Narcissism: “I don’t care which way you turn, it’s all about me” (A lot of us TV types own this one).

Then there’s…

The anniversary party's cancelled, boys

Multiple Personality Disorder: “Turn left! Turn right! Go straight! Go back!”

Let’s not forget…

Clinical Depression: “It doesn’t matter which way you go, you’re not going to get where you want to anyway.”

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Bob Maistros

January 19 – French Co-operation Minister Alain Joyandet complains to a reporter about the U.S. role in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti,” Minister Joyandet said.

January 21 – Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton respond to French expressions of concern about the U.S. “occupying Haiti” by saying that America would step

How are you doing? We're helping more than the Americans, right? Right?!

back from an on-the-ground role. “After wide-ranging discussions with international leaders,” Gates and Clinton indicate in a statement released by the White House, “it’s been determined that the French would take the lead in assisting and rebuilding Haiti with the same, to coin a phrase, aplomb they have demonstrated in running their own country. We’ll just send cash.”

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Jamie Weinstein

With the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s presidency upon us, pundits are deluging op-ed pages and cable news shows with their analysis of year one in the Age of Obama. But whose opinion can we trust? What analyst can we turn to for unfiltered truth?

Well, why not America’s most trusted politician? You know, indicted former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Great political theatre.

With an anniversary of his own just recently passed in December (the one-year anniversary of his arrest, that is), I thought I would see what the man who governed Illinois when Obama was making his meteoric rise in politics, first in Illinois and then nationwide, thought of how his former constituent has done in the White House.

“You can make a very strong argument that [President Obama] is just, you know, a more eloquent Bush,” Blago told me over the phone at the end of December, expressing his disappointment in Obama. “Obama gets elected and his first economic stimulus plan is what? He takes our money, the taxpayers money, calls it economic stimulus and gives it to the big banks.”

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Dan Calabrese

All right. Does someone want to tell me just what kind of country this is?

Fourteen months ago, red states like Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina voted for Barack Obama for president.

America rejects right-wing conservatism once and for all!

Down boy.

Yesterday, the bluest of blue states, Massachusetts, elects a Republican U.S. senator for the first time in a generation, expressly for the purpose of preventing a government takeover of health care.

America rejects left-wing liberalism once and for all!

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Candace Talmadge

Director James Cameron’s billion-dollar, award-winning blockbuster, Avatar, bears a striking resemblance to Dances with Wolves in its basic plot. White guy from a military background encounters an indigenous population, falls in love, decides their values and way of life are superior to his, and casts his culture aside.

Dances With Wolves in space?

Of course, there are some refinements to Avatar, mostly the over-the-top technical effects that make this film possible and that are woven into the storyline. The white guy, a crippled former Marine named Jake Sully, uses an avatar, a biomechanical fictional being that is genetically engineered to be half human and half Na’vi, the inhabitants of the planet Pandora. With it he is able to walk again, breath air that is poisonous to human beings, and mingle with the natives to learn their ways.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Grayscale version for newspaper publication.